Three out of four men have a low sperm count

The sperm quality among young, Danish men is so bad that 1 per cent will find it more difficult to get their partner pregnant than usual, without any help from fertility treatment. Additionally, 25 per cent can look forward to a long wait before the pregnancy is final.

This is the conclusion of the world’s most extensive research on sperm quality. The research has been completed by the Department for Growth and Reproduction at Rigshospitalet (the National Hospital of Denmark). The hospital also determined that three out of four young Danish men have a low sperm count.

“This is the greatest research of sperm quality and the message is that it looks bad,” says Chief Physician Niels Jørgensen who is the first author of the scientific article on sperm quality which has been published in the scientific magazine British Medical Journal Open.

The greatest worry is the 15 per cent of young men with fewer than 15 million sperm cells per millilitre. However, the scientists also stress that in 35 per cent of the tests, only 5 per cent of the sperm cells had a normal shape. Actually, the average of normal sperm cells for all tests was as low as 6.5 per cent. “There is great reason to worry about the future fertility of the young Danish men,” Niels Jørgensen and his colleagues conclude in their article.

Niels Jørgensen and his colleagues conclude that there is no reason to believe that the young men haven’t yet fully developed. Rigshospitalet has observed 150 young men for several years whose sperm quality did not improve.